With one gesture, Bridie’s white-gloved hand rejected this courtly offer. “I’m riding with the young fry.” She scrambled into the broad seat beside Chris before Decker could assist her. “That is, if I ain’t crowding.” Seated, she now raised her voice to an astonishing shriek that carried to the rejected pair in the second car. “No offense, Czar, and you too, Mr. Mayor. But Bridie Ballantyne never sits at the second table.” Again her whoop of laughter.

The second car now moved off into first place. As it passed smartly the two men could be seen shaking their heads in amusement or disapproval or both. “You kill me,” Ott Decker remarked, inadequately, as he slid into the front seat beside the two women.

Bridie patted the head of the girl in the white parka, gave a straightening jerk to her own hat that had gone askew as she clambered in, adjusted her scarf, wrapped her seal coat about her silk-clad legs, licked her lips with a quick nervous flick of triumph, gave a little settling hunch to her shoulders, sighed with satisfaction, and took her handkerchief from her bag with a flourish that assailed the atmosphere with Parma violet—all this in a series of gestures so swift as to melt into one rhythmic sequence.

“Up front is where I like to sit,” she went on, as though continuing a conversation, “so’s I can see what Chris is hitting before she hits it.” Suddenly she leaned forward to stare at the vehicle’s pale orchid hood. “Say, whose car is this, anyway, you’re driving, Chris? It sure ain’t yours, unless you’ve bought a new one or Czar’s gone wild and given you one, not likely.”

“Mine,” Ott Decker said plaintively. “My brand-new Thunderbird. And don’t ask me why I let her drive it to the airport. Except she busted up her own. And I’m nuts about her.”

Chris’s voice was soft and low. Some said this was a trick she had learned from old Czar. The resentful ones said it was an affectation. She soft-pedals it, they complained, so you have to listen close, that way she makes everything she says sound important.

“Bridie Ballantyne, you know perfectly well I’ve never hit anything, and I’ve been driving since I was fifteen, haven’t I!”

“Then what does Ott mean—you busted up your car!”

“Something hit me. Yesterday I was driving down past Mile Forty and a moose charged right out at me from the woods, I never saw anything so silly, I thought for a minute that I’d be out in the snow and the moose would be in the front seat, driving. It was a close thing, he damaged the radiator and broke a headlight. And my spirit, of course. I never thought a moose would hunt me.”

Bridie pointed in the direction of the fast-vanishing car ahead of them. “I wish I had those two men here this minute. I got up and told them, last week’s City Council meeting, I said, more moose around this winter than I’ve seen in fifty years, they’ll be promenading down Gold Street next. Oh, no, they said, and anyway that’s the wrong kind of publicity to give out about Alaska. Ott, why’n’t you Chamber of Commerce people do something?”